Judge Thacker did not stay mad at us. Three months later at the next court session he granted Minor a divorce from Anatilda. He said he figured attempted murder of the first degree was grounds enough.
“What say you, Abita Carter?” These were the words Minor used to ask me to marry him. We were at our special place on Bayou de l’Outre in late spring. The wild canaries had just returned to haunt the streamers of gray moss. We stood on the giant cypress log. “I say yes to you, Minor Barrett,” I answered, and my thoughts drifted to the half of the cypress log hidden beneath the water. I imagined a hole in the trunk that beckoned magic sunbeams into a basket for the prosperity of my grandmother’s people, of which I was one.
We were married at the Carters’ house by a new preacher who had settled in the village. He was mostly John Wesleyan Methodist. I was not the most beautiful woman at the wedding. My mother was. Mrs. Carter sent her a secret invitation, and their hired man brought her from Monroe in the buggy. She was very short. Except for the silver strands mixed in her long black hair, her face looked the same to me. She stood at my side and held tight to my arm as we said the vows.
Being married to Minor was wonderful, but the hard times multiplied for everyone as the war dragged on. When Minor signed the parole papers at Vicksburg, he promised not to fight again until there was an official swapping of prisoners. Early in 1865 a Confederate captain came to Farmerville and posted on the courthouse door a list of Union Parish soldiers whose paroles were lifted and who were ordered under threat of desertion charges to report for duty at Cotile Bayou near Alexandria. Minor’s name was on the roll. I begged him not to go. I lied and told him he was not able-bodied. I reminded him that he did not have a horse since the Tubbs had kept the Claybank mare and departed with her in the dark of the night on their exodus to Texas. He filled my arms with wild irises of burnished copper, bought a green-broke, strawberry roan gelding and left in April.
I went to live with the Carters again, and for two months I walked to the cypress log on Bayou de l’Outre at least once a week to pray until Judge Thacker came with a warning of Butcherman. The judge told us a story of a man named Cook who had been in his courtroom the day before. The man had been captured by a fourteen-year-old boy near Marion while trying to steal a plow horse. In the small back chamber of the courthouse Cook pleaded for mercy and offered the judge a tale of a greater felony.
Cook said that a year or so back he fell in with the man we called Butcherman driving his oxcart on the Homer Road a few miles west of Shiloh. That evening, they met up with a soldier and all got drunk on Cook’s plum brandy. When the soldier passed out, Butcherman hatched a plan to double his freight money and make good use of an empty coffin. Cook said that Butcherman committed the “high crime” on the soldier and offered to split the extra funds if Cook would go along with the scheme. Cook said he feared for his own life and had no choice. They carried the bodies of Tommy Ratliff and the new soldier to Homer in Claiborne Parish. Tommy’s father paid them proper, but when they offered up the new soldier to his family on Sugar Creek, telling them that he was picked up in Vidalia also, troubles began. The man’s sister said she had just received a letter from him in which he claimed to be on his way home from Arkansas. The Homer sheriff got suspicious, and Butcherman and Cook decided to donate their services to the family and left town in the night. Before parting ways, Butcherman threatened Cook by telling him that only three people in this world could testify against his story, and he planned to take care of two of them, a lawyer and his half-breed woman over near Iron Branch, soon enough.
After this story, Judge Thacker told Mr. Carter that I should stay close by on the farm and be ever alert. Butcherman’s words from the Tensas began haunting me day and night. He had said, “Nothing is more certain than death, and nothing is so uncertain as its time.”
On the first day of June 1865, I got up early as usual and hummed my way out the back door in my nightdress and down the path to the cedar-board outhouse. Mr. Carter was already gone to check the crops, and his wife was starting the breakfast fire in the stove with slivers of fat pine. As I reached the outhouse I noticed a movement in the road at the corner of the garden, just where Lemuel had called to me two years earlier. The movement—the flicking ear of an ox—stopped me in my tracks. I took a step back to see around the pole beans and saw the bright wheel of the cart. Before I could act in response, the door of the outhouse burst open and I was in the clutches of Butcherman. Still smelling worse than the foulest hog, he shoved me into the outhouse and barred the door from the outside with the heavy latch that kept out the night-foraging possums. I wailed an animal cry of fear.
“Shut up, you wormy sow. Where’s yer educated ruttin’ partner? I’ve got more news for the both of ya, and I’m afeared it’s all sad again.” Butcherman obviously did not know that Minor had left for the war again.
Suddenly, Mrs. Carter called from the back porch, “Abita, what’s the commotion? Is that chicken snake in there again?” Before the end of these words settled on the light dew she screamed, and I heard a crash of pots and dishes in the house. Mrs. Carter’s hand bell, the one she used to call me to morning lessons for many years, rang once and all was quiet. I beat on the door of my prison and alternately pressed my eye to the breast-high knothole in the door. I saw Butcherman when he came out of the house and walked out of my view toward the cart. Moments later, his eye was an inch from mine at the knothole. Where an eye is usually white, his was the yellow of spoiled eggs. Where there is normally color, the gray of wet ashes encircled the window to his condemned soul. I jerked back and slammed my hand over the knothole. The blade of his knife sliced through my palm and out the back of my hand so fast that I felt no pain until he withdrew it.
“Mite dull, don’t ya think, Missy? Good iron though. Six inch blade made from a Birmingham hoe with a black hickory handle.” His voice was calm, matter-of-fact. “Before I join you in that crapper for our discussion I’m gonna sharpen it a bit. You might want to listen.”
I knew very well the sound of a knife blade drawn slowly across a dry whetstone. For long minutes he kept at it while blood from both sides of my hand soaked through the whole front of my nightdress.
“There now,” he said. “There ain’t enough handle on this sticker to carve a notch for ever critter it’s skinned, and that don’t even count human varmints.” He slid the bar back from the door letting it swing open and slap the outhouse with a dull thud. If I had had my senses about me I could have charged out then and perhaps escaped his intended crime, but I crouched in the back corner holding my wounded hand to my breast.
Butcherman stepped close and stood just across the threshold with the bright, early sun to one side of his head. To me, his silhouette looked black as death. “You got a choice here, Missy.” He was looking down and speaking almost softly. “If’n you tell me the whereabouts of that Barrett boy, I’ll bar this door again and go on about my business. If’n you squawk loud enough, the old man of this place will turn up and set you loose by and by.”
I wished I knew where Minor was at that moment. I wished he would gallop into the yard, jump the garden fence on the strawberry roan and rescue me. It could have happened.
Butcherman continued, “But if you decide to play dumb injun, for starters you and that giant darky on the Tensas is gonna speak the same language. I can’t tolerate no loose tongues in these times. And there won’t be no readin’ or writin’ up testimonies for no judge either. That’ll take some close work, but you’ll likely live if you ain’t too thin-blooded.” He flipped the knife in his hand. “What’s yer answer?”
I did not have a voice much less an answer. It was another of those times in my life when I seemed to be watching my fate from a distance. I saw an in-between girl trapped in an outhouse, about to be mutilated by a madman while hummingbirds twittered and fussed over red honeysuckle on the fence. Her thoughts were not those of the situation at hand but of a man with eyes as dark as hers who would never be in her arms again.
Butcherman came for me then. This time the pain was instant and terrible. With the first blow my arm fell useless to my side, and my neck felt as though it was scalded with boiling water. He butted me and we were awash in blood—and then he lay very still with his head in my lap in the outhouse.
Mrs. Carter had shot us both with her husband’s two-barreled derringer. The first ball struck the top of my collarbone breaking it clean. The second cut a deep trough down the side of Butcherman’s head, not killing him, but addling him thoroughly until Mr. Carter arrived.
When Minor returned safely to me three days later on the fourth of June, things were mostly sorted out. Butcherman was locked in the Farmerville jail with Cook. My injuries were on the long healing path. Except for a small cut on her forehead and a burden of grief for shooting me, which she carries yet in spite of my pleas, Mrs. Carter was not seriously harmed. By her own account Butcherman never touched her. In her efforts to halt his advances she had turned over the pie safe and knocked down the cupboard before falling against the stove. Poor Minor seemed to suffer more than anyone though, of guilt for not being here to prevent this tragedy. He vowed to attend the trial and see that justice was upheld.
Head bandaged in flour sack rags and shackled in his own leg irons, Butcherman was tried on the first morning of the July docket. Because of the South’s surrender politics, it was the last court session in Union Parish for a long time. Cook testified against Butcherman as promised, and Judge Thacker sentenced him to hang the following Thursday, as soon as the old scaffold could be repaired. Cook’s trial was in the afternoon. He was found guilty of horse theft. Judge Thacker spoke angrily to him about his part in the soldier’s murder, but he kept his word too. He sentenced Cook to ten years in prison, less one day for speaking against Butcherman. Cook never served his sentence, though, at least not Judge Thacker’s. Butcherman strangled him to death that night with his head bandage in their jail cell.
Minor and Mr. Carter almost missed the execution. When Judge Thacker heard of the latest crime, he said, “To Hell with the old scaffold. I know of a dammed fine hangin’ tree.” And he moved the date up to Monday. The tree was an old broke-topped sycamore on the Bayou D’Arbonne side of the courthouse square just up from the ferry. Until the hanging, squealer ducks had nested in its holler every spring, and the low winter light played on the ivory bark in a way that reminded me of nakedness. A single stout limb reaching out from the downhill side is still called the Butcherman’s Branch by boys of the town.
The law was abided as the church bell struck ten of the morning. Some while later the oxcart with red and black wheels carried the body of Butcherman to a pauper’s grave close beside the man named Cook.
Minor came back home late that afternoon and solemnly announced that the Butcherman of Boyd’s Ferry would from that day forward torment only his brothers in Purgatory. I asked Minor and Mr. Carter if the Butcherman had a real name, one that was attached to his soul by his mother at his birth. No one knew of it, they said. I wonder what kind of tragedy could befall a person to cause him to lose his name to the world. Whatever the accident, I hope it was the reason for his evil nature. It makes me feel safer from the devil.
In the time that has passed since the war ended, a gloom has settled on the land. The few large farmers like the Tubbs have mostly left Union Parish. Without their slaves they are land poor. The Carters and other average folks are getting by, being accustomed to feeding themselves. The freed Negroes are suffering the most. Without direction for the first time, many have yet to realize they are responsible for their own lives. They ramble about in search of one Holy Grail after another. Some have taken to stealing almost as often as the sorry white men of the parish. Black and white women and children have come near to starving for want of worthy husbands and fathers. Northern scalawags have drifted in to take advantage of everyone, their politics rubbing salt in open wounds. Uncertainties of the future rise up like revetments on all sides with the people in the middle. Healing remains around some distant bend of a southern road.
Minor tries to support us by practicing the law, but few have money to pay for his services. It is ironic that his principal business is settling the matters of dead soldiers. I am affected by the lack of income less than others because being in-between has always been my life and, as I have recently concluded, my fate. I am not averse to the state, as once was the case, for it has proven to enhance the experience of blessings simple and great. This year we have become partners with the Carters to put in a cotton crop. We live in the house of Minor’s mother, where books and the window with one hundred twenty panes surround me. Lemuel, Mink, and other friends visit when they find time. My wounds have healed with the only lingering effect being that I now must churn butter left-handed. Minor suffers a slight limp when he is tired but is otherwise well. As I chop cotton at the Carters’, I can watch Chula growing fat and old across the rail fence. And in the cool evenings there is the balm of my anniversary gift, which Minor purchased at the auction of the Tubbs’ estate. People say it is the largest sugar kettle in Union Parish. But Minor says its use is necessary to soothe my swelling belly and ease my apprehensions in this, yet latest expression of an in-between life with a particular man.
THE END